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This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the pedagogical concept of encounter by providing an overview of its use from
the historical foundations of the concept in Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1903 to 1991) philosophy to contemporary
phenomenological readings by Maxine Greene, Donald Vandenberg and Robyn Harrison. The outcome is a critical
analysis and evaluation of the significance of the concept in educational contexts. The aims of the paper are as follows:
a) to articulate the educational significance of the concept of encounter, and b) to clarify its relationship to the
humanistic concept of formation (or unfolding; Bildung), in order to establish the tension between Bildung-theory
and the existential theory of human formation. The paper claims that, for a more elaborated understanding of the
human educative process, the tension between the processes of encounter and Bildung should be seen as the core
tension behind the holistic view of becoming human. Also, c) for an analysis of the Anglo-American reception of the
concept, a phenomenological view of the encounter as a transcendental aspect of a learning process will be made in
order to gain a wider view of the concept.
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Jani Koskela & Pauli Siljander 72
which he articulates the concept of encounter in relation to the classical notions of formation (Bildung) established in
19th and 20th century German educational philosophy. We will claim that, for a more elaborated understanding
of the human educative process, these discontinuous aspects of formation that Bollnow stresses in his work
should be taken into account. In this article, we will articulate the educational significance of the concept of
encounter, clarify its relationship to the humanistic concept of formation (or unfolding; Bildung), so as to establish
the tension between Bildung-theory and the existential theory of human formation, and state in detail Bollnow’s
understanding of the special nature of the concept of Bildung in existential educational discourse. We will also
make an analysis of the Anglo-American reception of the concept in readings by Maxine Greene, Donald
Vandenberg and Robyn Harrison, who introduce a phenomenological view of encounter as a transcendental
aspect of a learning process. In so doing, we aim at a wider view and a concise contemporary use of the
concept. The outcome is a critical analysis of the concept but also an evaluation of its pedagogical significance.
particular acquaintanceship, but to an experience that shakes a person to the core. In this sense, encounter is
always an existential experience. A person carried away by enthusiasm in seeking knowledge of something
important to self would still not be touched deeply in an existential way (Bollnow, 1966, p. 160). On this view, it
is not enough to spectate. Rather, one must engage oneself fully in the matter at hand by taking a position on it.
One must decide for oneself to be either for or against the event. Bollnow aims to understand this engagement,
this being-touched-by-something, by referring to it with the concept of existential encounter (c.f. Bollnow,
1966, p. 161). For Bollnow, encounter is a fundamental experience in which the subject meets something new,
strange, uncontrollable, and (to the subject) incomprehensible. An encounter is a collision with everything
outside one’s understanding, not a meeting with the familiar. It is a meeting with something outside one’s ‘life-
world’. Through this collision with something new, encounter presents a possibility for self-examination. In
other words, encountering a force outside subjective understanding results in a change to that subjective
understanding; one recognizes an entity that is not understood, and begins to learn. By no means is encounter
necessarily a pleasant experience; it affects the subject profoundly, leading to self-examination or reflection and
a change in one’s way of living or being.
A significant response to questions of encounter appeared in Bollnow’s Existential Philosophy and Education:
A Treatise on the Discontinuous Forms of Education (Existenzphilosophie und Pädagogik: Versuch über unstetige Formen der
Erziehung, 1959), which furnishes a theory of discontinuous education that aims to overcome the phenomenon
falling into the inauthentic, everyday existence through intermittent awakening. Bollnow recommended that, to
motivate a student, instead of praise and blame, a teacher should use admonition, which by reminding students
of a failure to complete helps them to reorient themselves toward fulfilling their own possibilities of being.
Admonition looks forward, involves the entire temporal structure (Bollnow, 1959, p. 63), and respects the
pupil’s freedom because it is only a call to conscience (c.f. Bollnow, 1959, p. 66). In these terms, admonition
can cause the pupil to awaken from a state of being-obligated-to-be-nothing (Nicht-so-sein-sollens) to being-
obligated-to-be-oneself (Sein-sollens), and from a state of being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-seins) to being-in–the-
truth (In-der-Wahrheit-seins) (c.f. Bollnow, 1959, pp. 47-48). This awakening may occur also in an educative
encounter through the content of a curriculum such as that for which Bollnow gives a phenomenological
description in ‘Begegnung und Bildung, Encounter and Education’ (see Bollnow, 1955b; Vandenberg, 1971, p.
158). Indeed, one may have an intellectual encounter with an author or figure of the past or present (Bollnow,
1959, p. 110; Vandenberg, 1971, p. 159), groups of people, previous times and cultures, works of poetry, and
with intellectual truths (c.f. Bollnow, 1959, p. 93). To distinguish encounter from theoretical interest, Bollnow
notes that deficient moods underlie abstract theorizing, and that an educative encounter involves one’s whole
being: “one must first of all value and only then can one understand” (c.f. Bollnow, 1959, p. 108), and, “I
understand only insofar as I place myself in question” (Bollnow, 1959, p. 110). These citations precede a
definition of education as “the intellectual encounter between the generations, or of the educational encounter
between the rising generation and the intellectual-historical world” (Bollnow, 1959, p. 93). Teachers cannot
contrive encounters with students, but they can promote their occurrence through a serious, respectful, engaged
treatment of curriculum content (c.f. Bollnow, 1959, pp. 125-130).
Several problems are apparent when faced with existential formulations of pedagogy. Bollnow’s
‘discontinuous education’ conflicts with classical notions of formation (Bildung) according to which a human
being is cultivated from a human animal and its causal environment, forming a cultural human with intentions
that establish its freedoms, namely individuality, the ability to recognize self and choose for oneself. Along with
this individuation one is also the subject of transmission of the culture. This process of cultivation or Bildung
occurs—according to classical notions—by transmitting cultural heritage from the older generation to the new
generation via education, which is regarded as a continuous, cumulative process (Bollnow, 1959, pp. 11-13;
1986, pp. 2-3). However, Bollnow’s existential understanding of education prompts the statement that the
development of a person can neither be continuous nor merely a cumulative process (Bollnow, 1986, pp. 4-6).
Setbacks, discontinuation, lag, jumps and leaps are all a discernible part of development. Clearly, tensions exist
between classical Bildung theory and existential notions of discontinuity: these tensions will be observed and
clarified next.
Jani Koskela & Pauli Siljander 74
From the viewpoint of encounter, Bollnow sees human development as discontinuous in nature. Encounter
states a tension between the subject, the ‘I’, and the cultural context this subject does not yet embrace. As
encounter discloses things to the self and makes them thus part of its life-world, encounter seems to play a
significant role in human formation, unfolding. Encounter itself is a collision; therefore human development is
possible only through collisions. Bollnow states that this development of human character, namely
individuation, and the tension between the individual and its culture, has been referred to from classical
hermeneutics to modern pedagogy as formation, or Bildung (c.f. Benner, 1996, 2003; Spranger, 1928). Therefore
to Bollnow, the concept of encounter is a very essential adjunct to the notion of Bildung. When formulating his
discontinuous forms of education, Bollnow does not refer to contemporary theories of Bildung, but rather, to
the classical notions of the concept (c.f. Koerrenz, 2004; Wehner, 2002).
Bollnow presents a new background philosophy for education, beginning with twofold classical notions
of education. The following two basic ideas can be regarded as the foundation for all the other variants of
educational thinking throughout the history of pedagogy. Bollnow terms the first idea the crafting analogy. In
this analogy education is like craftsmanship in the sense that the educator moulds his material, the educatee,
through an intentional, predetermined plan of action, and the result is a product of the correct and skilful use of
methods. From this standpoint, education is action, and the result of the action is determined by the educator.
Referring to this analogy, Bollnow cites the commonly used interpretation that ethics gives education its aims
and goals, and that psychology gives education the tools and methods to achieve these goals (see Bollnow, 1966;
Bräuer, 1978). The second analogy Bollnow employs when discussing education is organic growth (see Bollnow,
1966, p. 96). From this standpoint, human growth is not predetermined by outward influence, but is of inward
origin, like the growth of a plant or a tree. The process of human growth is regarded as a natural phenomenon
that education can at its worst only disturb. The organic growth analogy sees education as supportive action,
supportive of the individual process of inward growth. This supportive action or guidance requires certain
nurturing skills. Referring to these two analogies—the analogy of crafting and the analogy of organic growth—
Bollnow also uses the terms “mechanistic” and “organic.” The former is founded in the era of Enlightenment
and the latter in romanticism (c.f. Benner, 1996).
Bollnow starts with a rather simple thought that, in a general sense, each life can be characterized as a
process of reciprocal interaction of a living being (organism) with an environing world. And, if one extends the
viewpoint to include life-history—that is, bears in mind that life does not remain the same in this interaction but
conjointly enlarges and transforms itself from within in the course of time such that it grows – then one must
add that this growth itself occurs in the very same way as the reciprocal interaction between the living being and
the environment (Bollnow, 1959, p. 27). This means that this growth takes place in the reciprocal interaction
and interpenetration of two necessarily successive, related processes: an unfolding from within, Bildung, and an
assimilation from without. Unfolding, Bildung, however, can progress only so far as to how much
“nourishment” it has gained from the environing world (c.f. Kümmel, 1977; Morris, 1966). Growth can
continue only if it assimilates external matter. This external nourishment is the precondition for growth to
occur. Bildung only succeeds and becomes actual growth as long as an individual advances toward the materiality
of the outer world in which the unfolding takes place and that is to a certain degree a kind of intellectual
nourishment for the growing person. However, talking of “materiality” may not be completely appropriate
here: Bollnow stresses that the stimulating material should not be considered as generally available material with
no relation to the concrete life processes of the individual. In actuality, it becomes nourishment only to the
extent that it enters into the life-zone of this self-determining, unfolding life. It is not to be seen as something
existing in the abstract, but as concrete and actual in human life world. This explains the concept of the
encounter further: it is a process in which a definite actuality steps in in relation to life as one of the materials
enabling its expansion, as a kind of intellectual nourishment. And thus the two concepts, Bildung and encounter,
characterize the polarity in which everything comes to pass as intellectual growth. They are thus reciprocally
interdependent. Encounter is not Bildung, and Bildung is not encounter. However, encounter without
synchronous unfolding of human powers would stifle evolution and individual development under the mass of
Jani Koskela & Pauli Siljander 75
received material. Bildung without the confronting encounter would ultimately pass into emptiness
(Bollnow,1955a, p. 33). This allows us to understand an important tension in the history of German
educational thought. While in the Era of Enlightenment and with Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) it
seemed that organic development meant nothing more than the unfolding of what was already present, the
concern broadened with Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) to include the assimilation of encountered,
human cultural products (c.f. Spranger, 1928; Benner, 2003). Education (Erziehung) in the full sense of the
German classics can be defined from this point on as precisely this balance between assimilated materials and
developed powers, with one being able to develop only in conjunction with the other. What Bollnow realises
here is something significant to educational theory, and to the view of man behind it: these two processes are
crucial to human development, and they are both necessary. But, they do not happen on the same life-world
plane. In reality, the encounter lies on a wholly different plane and changes the whole way of thinking so
radically that it cannot be added as a supplement to, or correction of a way of thinking emerging primarily from
an unfolding (Bildung). Thus, these processes can never be put together: where the encounter begins, there
Bildung has lost its claim, and conversely: where Bildung defines the human happening, there encounter in the full
sense cannot take place (Bollnow, 1955a, p. 36). This tension of the dualism of the educative process of a
human being has been lost in time in educational philosophy (c.f. Kakkori & Huttunen, 2010).
From this understanding we move to the treatment of educative encounter, a happening where these two
aforementioned processes are seen together side by side. As stated before, encounter can be described with the
metaphor of two ships meeting each other at sea. These two ships do not encounter each other if they, coming
from opposite directions, sail past one another. This separates encounter from other pedagogical processes, as
pedagogy itself roots etymologically to ”walking beside”. Also, it is not an encounter if a ship encounters a
stationary object. By necessity, the two who encounter are in movement. In terms of humanly encountering
another human, both have their own naturally flowing everyday lives and life-worlds with their own dynamics.
An encounter between those is not a meeting of the safest kind, just like an encounter between two ships at a
sea is a crash course of those two ships moving in converging directions. Bollnow describes the necessary
features of an educative encounter: there is always a “toward” in the encounter, it is a meeting and moreover, an
impact or a collision of some sort. Encounter always includes the occurrence of actual contact. This leads to
life-changing events (c.f. Kneller, 1958; Yalom, 1980; Todd, 1995; Deurzen-Smith, 1988; Jacobsen, 2008). Also,
encounter would not have such a dramatic effect on the life of a human being if it were predictable (c.f.
Sanderson, 2004). Therefore, Bollnow stresses that the encounter is something accidental and unpredictable.
One is taken by surprise by it (Bollnow 1955a, p. 40). Educative encounter is a definitive encounter with a
given subject matter, and not a collision of random things in the corner of a street. Therefore it is also
appropriate to contrast the pedagogic encounter with the category of the transmittal of knowledge in instruction
and the education thereby acquired. In instruction, the emphasis is solely on the “objective side,” on the
material to be assimilated (Bollnow, 1955a, p. 46). Pedagogical encounter does not happen on the “objective
side”, but is a thoroughly subjective experience. Encounter characterizes the personal meeting of the world,
and this subjective experience of the fundamental difference between oneself and the world is a precondition to
learning from it (c.f. Husserl, 1952; Heidegger, 1962). Thus, encounter is not about the assimilated material but
about the learning subject himself, the person and his developing intellectual powers.
Encounter with an object of study, however, implies that now both sides collide with an equal weight of
reality (Bollnow, 1955a, p. 47). In the encounter with an actuality that comes to meet him that does not yield
before him, the person in a real sense becomes “shaken”. From this fact, that encounter implies dislocation of
the natural life-flow; it obtains its characteristic severity, an inexorability and inevitability. Bollnow sums up
certain fundamental differences of educational encounter from educational instruction: (a) the material of
education is appropriated by the subject, assimilated; it disappears in the subject, as it were, and the subject
unfolds himself in this process of assimilation. One emerges enlarged and enriched; (b) the encountered thing,
on the other hand, continues in its independence and consequently requires a wholly different attitude from the
person, (c) the subject must answer the claim that comes to meet him in the encounter, he must answer in a
suitable way, and what counts as suitable is defined not by the subject but by the encountered thing, (d) the
material of education as such offers no claims, but the encountered thing steps opposite to him as a challenging
thing, (e) it is a trial of the ultimate intellectual authenticity. In this ”shaking up,” the subject must prove
himself. He can succeed or fail.
Jani Koskela & Pauli Siljander 76
When one speaks of education, it means the well-rounded and harmonious unfolding of human powers,
Bildung. It is important for the subject to make contact with as many sides of the materials of education as
possible to ensure his Bildung in all directions. Education is necessarily many-sided education (Bollnow, 1955a,
p. 50). The rigor of the encounter, however, is characterized as opposite to this, for in it all harmonious
development loses its meaning. Every encounter is fateful, as it immediately takes hold of the whole person.
Many-sided encounters would be a contradiction in terms, for one encounter always excludes any other; the
encounter is the more authentic, the more unconditionally and exclusively it takes hold of the person. Several
encounters are possible only at considerable intervals from one another, never at the same time (Bollnow,
1955a, p. 50).
The act of recognizing this encounter is a wakening responsiveness … A wakeful encounter frees
learners to project their futures and investigate their outer horizons. Freed from the world as given,
the ’natural attitude,’ a re-constitution of their lived world can be pursued by the learners in
pedagogic dialogue with the teacher. (Harrison, 2000, pp. 61, 98)
There are degrees of intensity of the encounter that the teacher is able to invoke, ranging from the slight
awareness that hardly results in a ’second look’ to the encounter that generates a response like Rainer Maria
Rilke’s before the ’Archaean Torso of Apollo,’ which seemed to say to him, ’You must change your life’
(Vandenberg, 2002b, p. 330; Greene, 1967, p. 155; Bollnow, 1972, pp. 310-312; Bollnow, 1955a, p. 31; see also
Field, 2006).
Vandenberg, Greene and Harrison all refer with the concept of encounter to a phenomenal state that
penetrates the consciousness of a learner. Encounter in this respect is a thoroughly mental process, referring to
the inner state of one’s mental life and the contradiction it might have with the subjective perception of the
outer world. Encounter seems to definitively address an extrinsic property of learning: it is conditionally a
possible part of the mental process of learning. Why only extrinsic? An extrinsic property is a property that
depends on a thing's relationship with other things (see Lewis, 1983). Vandenberg unintentionally seems to
describe encounter as relational property, when describing it as a transcendental phase of learning. Although
the phenomenology around the concept is concise, he refers to Johann Friedrich Herbart’s four steps of
instruction: clarity, association, system and method (Vandenberg, 2002b, p. 330; Herbart, 1971, p. 57) and equates
these with the transcendental phases, and thus pushes encounter away from the possibility of being an essential
property to learning. While doing this Vandenberg doesn’t seem to stress sufficiently the difference between
categories of action and categories of events or processes. Herbart’s steps are instructional steps and, as such,
phases of intentional educative action. This is in contradiction to the transcendental categories, as they do not
directly refer to intentional action but subjective experiences of such action or even, to other mental states, i.e.
learning. If by chance Vandenberg’s formulation of equating instructional steps with transcendental phases
would be considered correct, then the phenomenological encounter is not a necessary, intrinsic property of
learning but a relational, conditional property. For Vandenberg, transcendental phases of learning are
swappable with categories of instruction, and thus encounter as a transcendental phase cannot be an intrinsic
property. However, in comparison to the theoretical foundations of the concept, to our understanding,
Vandenberg’s interpretation should be questioned in this sense. Encounter is an intrinsic property of learning: it
is the first phenomenal phase of a mental process leading to awakening of the tensions and discrepancies
between ones inner life-world and the outer life-world. It should not, as such, be mixed up with any
instructional concepts or intentional educative action other than those which refer to them through a subjective,
experiential filter. Thus encounter would still hold up to its existential foundations.
meeting with something that “shakes a person to the core”, requires all the capacity the person has to overcome
this encounter, and promotes the development and unfolding of personal intellectual powers.
Greene, Vandenberg and Harrison refer to encounter as a transcendental phase of learning (Greene,
1997; Vandenberg, 2002b; Harrison, 2000). This means that encounter is not an objectively observable part of
human learning, but a phenomenal and subjective aspect to this process. This definition does not stress a
certain factor to a degree it would deserve. We would claim that encounter is not only an extrinsic phase to this
transcendental process, but rather an intrinsic property or a necessary condition for it. No learning would occur
without an individual, subjective, phenomenal encounter. But to clarify how encounter can be seen both as an
extrinsic, transcendental phase and an intrinsic property of learning, the existential concept of encounter still
needs to be wrested from its psychic appropriation. This means that the value of the encounter as reference to
self-formation must be separated from its value as encounter in its existential sense, as first and foremost a
collision with what in its essence is outside a subjective life-world, i.e. the experienced reality. But how, then,
are the psychic "self-formation" and the resistance of the outer "worldliness" to be brought together?
In this paper we have reviewed two ways of referring to encounter: as a subjective experience of an
educational process and as a transcendental condition to learning. Encounter in its most concise articulation
has therefore two slightly different meanings. When encounter is referred to (a) as a subjective experience of
educational process, which historically speaking has taken the formulation of Bildung, it is being referred to as an
experience of an aspect of intentional action to which the experiencing person is part of. There is also a notion
of an experience of inner unfolding, or inner growth, to which the encounter is a parallel process. When the
concept of encounter is referred to (b) as a transcendental phase of learning, it is referred to as a mental state
and not as an action. However, in both articulations (a) and (b), encounter is a subjective experience, i.e. a
mental state. In addition, the object of this mental state can be seen in both of these meanings, (a) and (b), in
two different ways: firstly, the object the encounter is referring to is action and a process set forward by this
action (Learning as action, education as action) and secondly, the object of the mental state is another mental
state, i.e. learning (as a mental state) or Bildung (as inner unfolding of competences). The analysis in this article
shows that if we treat these two separate definitions side by side, two conclusions follow. As according to
Bollnow, if encounter is not Bildung (i.e. human development as natural unfolding of inner powers), then
learning is neither. If we take for granted what Vandenberg (2002b), Greene (1997) and Harrison (2000) state
about encounter as a phase of learning and as such an intrinsic property, then this would be a logical conclusion.
Learning has a discontinuous nature, and learning is not fully part of a natural flow of human life and
development. This will bring us to concluding remarks on the meaning of the concept.
It is clear by no credible disagreement that existential encounter seems to possess a distinctively dualist
nature; namely, that it seems to refer both to a phenomenon of psychic self-formation and to resistance of the
world's transcendental, constitutive powers. But this separation is only formal, and not substantial to the
encounter itself. There is no need to separate the subjective experiences from the materiality of the world. The
world that we encounter – the strangeness intruding our experiences – is encountered in our subjective
experiences. But at the same time, there are no substantive means of separating the experiencing subject from
the worldly resistance being encountered. Both are constituted temporally and in a reciprocal relation. This
constitution thus occurs in a manner such that no meaningful phenomenological separation can be made
between the two: mind and the world. It does not make sense to speak of existential encounter merely as a
mental state, nor does it make any sense to speak of an encounter with a worldly object, or "a critical mass" that
is outside the bounds of experience and that would remain this way. Whatever is being encountered, is encountered as
an intrusion within the range of subjective experience. This is why transcendental phase of learning in the sense of
psychic, inner unfolding does not fully grasp the essence of the encounter and thus something is left out,
something extrinsic to the process. What is not inherent in the psychic processes is the "world" in its
phenomenological sense. At the same time, no learning would be possible without an encounter with
incomprehensible resistant forces that intrude into the range of experience from the outside world. Namely,
whatever is being encountered is encountered also as a thing in itself and not merely as a mental representation. But to describe
this paradox, one can only rely on dualist terminology, to the "inner" realm and the outside world. The
existential encounter reveals to us that there is no radical separation of the two to be made that would have any meaningful
pedagogical relevance. At a first glance, encounter may not seem to play any particular role in contemporary learning
theories. However, as this analysis shows, despite it having a long idea-historical ‘burden’ on its back (as a
Jani Koskela & Pauli Siljander 79
phenomenological concept), encounter is a useful theoretical tool in the contemporary formulations of human
learning.
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Pauli Siljander is a Professor of Educational Sciences at the University of Oulu. Professor Siljander’s research
work has focused on educational theory and philosophy, history of ideas in education, developmental trends
and traditions of educational science, and conceptions of pedagogics as a discipline. Recently his research group
has focused on connections between the classical theories of ‘Bildung’ and theories of growth based on
American pragmatism. Visit the project website at: http://wwwedu.oulu.fi/bildungandgrowth. Contact info:
pauli.siljander@oulu.fi
Jani Koskela is a university lecturer at the Faculty of Education at the University of Oulu, Finland, where he
gained his doctorate in philosophy of education with highest distinction. His research interests are related to
philosophy of education, phenomenology, university pedagogics, and educational systems. Koskela is a
member of prof. Pauli Siljander’s research group, funded by the Finnish Academy. Contact info:
jani.koskela@oulu.fi